The past year's poems
Like any writing, poetry’s a way to summon up and speak to different versions of yourself. Most often though, they don’t exist except as characters in daydreams.
Here are some of mine.
I’m hardly still that much the cynic you will meet below, but I’ve recalled his pain.
Labor
What kind of music's even left to write?
What fills my soul but something someone's felt
before? If I forget, can this be new
again? Must living mean dying? Oh why,
why don't we want to admit what is true?
In just a second, inevitably
a quiet space will empty in my head
where for a moment longer, surging sound
—ecstatic, holy, newborn, beautiful—
reigns indisputable, and death's a joke.
Social odia
In this space so vast and liminal,
slighted, I get slightly criminal—
seizing on today's defection,
ruining some cringe erection.
Elon's sub—or was it, Greta's?
terse—and much too versed in meta,
stressed—obsessed with alpha/beta,
raging—hemorrhaging my data.
On this branch each bird picks up a tic
and talks and talks and keeps god sick
with blue bird flu or some sus shit
behind a mask, before the front of it.
In your face and supercritical,
pointing, psycho-analytical—
frightened, righteous, egotistical,
twisted, traumatized, statistical—
paralyzed and apolitical,
staring down the parasitical
in this space so bare and clinical
marketing our best infections,
mirrors stiffen into cynical
clenching clenching clenching clenching
clenching
Contract
A minute since the heavens wept
and wet the moss which sponging mid my toes
solidified my spirit out the fog
of swimming shapes and incoherent ghosts.
Now reining in my eyes, down from the clouds
to watch the dancing lights upon the weave,
these ripples over silt and stones: a world
endures in just this corner's corner's edge!
Yet Earth moves ceaselessly beyond my sight—
its boundless tears of joy and pain misplaced
by me, in tending with this waving light.
Ineffability
I cannot write without a thought
for words, explicit forms, that strip
the meanings from my mind, like trees
torn from primordial tracts, or clothes
from off the prisoner's weary back.
Whatever bliss or fear I'd find
and living lightly, set it free,
instead I scheme to court with corpses
feeling nothing, noisily.
Content warning
To whom it may concern: just go ahead
and plunge and dig your claws into my chest.
Just break my ribs apart my sternum. Peel
the lining from my bones. You hear it peel?
Go on—put on your act and cringe in shock,
as though you weren't my very butcher. Feel
whatever you feel while you grasp my heart,
like you have always wanted. Squeeze it dead.
Theory
They claim to seek our optimum
but what is optimal to them
was drafted as they grew into success
and ratifies itself inside that game.
You'll hear them say from time to time,
alone and analytically,
"don't ditch the baby with the bathwater"—
then, en masse, in print, denounce entire fields.
Well how else should they stop the funds
from flowing where they shouldn't flow?
How will a human cope with clenching?
Clench?
Now everyone, please form your gangs.
Modern
There can be no more consolation got
by those now gone beyond our skill to save;
those all too many never will give thanks
for futures spared for them not soon enough.
All terrors past will always have occurred:
the blinding pain that bore our crueler ways;
the wounded, confused, stifled whimpers of grief;
the restless longing fading into black;
ultimately, the silence.
Indignantly and proud I seek the dawn
a second sun shall rise to share the sky,
and we'll forget that once, one couldn't ask,
"so where were you, the day the Devil died?".
Hereafter
Invigorated by the urge to speak
and keep on speaking, all too much to share
—an hour, a day, a year could not suffice—
my mouth rides on, inertially possessed.
Words pursue words no listeners will catch.
My audience disbands, but still there's hope
convulsing miserably in the dust,
chanting the unbelieving mass of death,
hunting for one more fragile syllable
in vain to banish silence for all time.